Asna Nusrat
Asna Nusrat (she/her) is from Karachi, Pakistan. She mostly writes fiction, nonfiction, and translations in English and Urdu. Her nonfiction is about the immigrant experience, financial debts, family and disease. Her novel-in-progress follows the life of a married Pakistani woman and explores the strangeness of feminine desire, the romance in the company of objects, and the private life of a woman’s mind. She worked as an Associate Editor for Hayden’s Ferry Review from 2021-2023 and served as the Genre Editor for Translations for 2023-2024. Her translations have been published on the Thousand Languages Project website and Lakeer Magazine. She completed her MFA in Fiction from Arizona State University and is currently pursuing a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing at University of Georgia.
Poetry (translation)
Nazm
and dying with the dead
Through my words
I will send you cylinders of breath
At the risk of losing likeness to the original word, I preferred the contours my translation added to the meaning, such as imagining “khabrain gardish bhi karain bhi tou kya” as winds running loose
Fiction (translation)
Open Them
A special train left Amritsar at two in the afternoon and arrived in Mughalpura eight hours later.